Organ donation proponents try controversial new tack

Some think failure to identify potential organ donors should be labeled a medical error, but others feel the idea itself is a mistake.

By Andis Robeznieks, AMNews staff. June 16, 2003.

A movement is afoot to link the drive for increasing organ donations to efforts aimed at reducing medical errors.

The idea being promoted is to consider it a "serious medical error" if a hospital fails to identify a medically suitable potential organ donor or fails to contact an organ procurement organization about a potential donor. By doing this, supporters say such failures will be reviewed and studied, and thus prevented from happening again.

"When organ donors are not referred and organs are buried, patients die and deaths in a hospital are a sentinel event," said Howard M. Nathan, president of the Gift of Life Donor Program, based in Philadelphia.

Nathan, whose organ procurement organization serves Delaware, Eastern Pennsylvania and Northern New Jersey, admitted the measure sounds "a little severe," but said it was a necessary step to "force hospitals to take this seriously."

The Assn. of Organ Procurement Organizations first advanced this idea in a May 6, 2002, letter to U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. The group pointed out how failure to identify a potential donor meets the National Quality Forum's definition of a "serious reportable event."

According to the letter, failure to identify a potential donor is "clearly identifiable and measurable," and the risk of it happening is "significantly influenced by the policies and procedures of the health care facility."

AOPO Executive Director Paul Schwab compared failing to identify a potential donor to overprescribing a drug or operating on the wrong side of the body. "There are 6,000 people dying each year for wanting an organ," Schwab said. "It carries with it some pretty serious morbidity. Why isn't it peer reviewed?"